CV

Sandro Sessarego is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics in 2010 from the Ohio State University and his J.D. in Italian Law in 2016 from the Università degli Studi di Roma. He works primarily in the fields of legal history, contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax. Among other works, he is the author of Afro-Peruvian Spanish: Spanish Slavery and the Legacy of Spanish Creoles (John Benjamins, 2015), The Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase: A Microparametric Account (Ohio State Press, 2014), Chota Valley Spanish (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2013), and Introducción al Idioma Afroboliviano (Plural Editores, 2011). He is the editor of The Dynamics of Language Variation and Change (John Benjamins, in press), Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis (John Benjamins, 2016), New Perspectives on Hispanic Contact Linguistics in the Americas (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2015), and Current Formal Aspects of Spanish Syntax and Semantics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).

FRIAS Project

Chocó Spanish: Casting Light on its Grammar and History

The linguistic study of the Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs), the languages that developed in Latin America from the contact of African languages and Spanish in colonial times, and the socio-historical analysis of their evolution form the main theme of my research program. This project combines linguistic, socio-historical, legal and anthropological insights to cast light on Chocó Spanish (CS), an Afro-Hispanic language spoken in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. This project will lead to the production of my new book, Chocó Spanish: An Afro-Hispanic Language on the Spanish Frontier. The interdisciplinary nature of this investigation and its focus on a little-studied Afro-Hispanic community make this work not only valuable to linguists; rather, other humanities scholars will also find it appealing.